Antonio Della Corte

Antonio Della Corte’s work takes shape in the discontinuous dimension of the “leftovers”, where everything has already been and where everything refers to something else. The artist moves through it, questions it, crosses it, and then plunges into that space that more than any other vomits up leftovers: the city.

Della Corte obsessively explores the urban landscape that surrounds him, exploring both central and marginal areas. He is especially fascinated by the myriad of random compositions he meets on the street, by those accidental combinations of shapes and objects assembled by the unknown rhythm of the metropolis, by the undeterred anthropogenic changes or by the succession of rain and wind. His visual and conceptual baggage is all based on these fortuitous works of art, on these anti-architectural images that emerge unexpectedly from the city. The urban investigation is followed by a work stage in which the artist relies on a “concrete logic”. Like the bricoleur Claude Lévi-Strauss talks about in The Savage Mind (1962), Della Corte addresses a set of existing elements that have been discarded: empty showcases, cables, neon and ceiling lights, components of household appliances and mechanical gears. These are declassified materials that no longer function, which the artist takes from the surrounding environment and which he subsequently modifies, combines, overlaps, decontextualises, “to understand what each of them could mean”. The result of these operations, however, does not express the destructive capacity of waste, nor is it an exercise in aesthetic rehabilitation, rather, it aims at prolonging the attention on shapes and objects which, just like those involuntary compositions he encounters on the street, seem to emerge for the first time from the weave of a secondary universe.

Although they may refer to familiar shapes and common objects, Della Corte’s archipelagos of matter retain an aura of attractive impenetrability that binds them to an underground world, that is silent, at times disturbing, and where everything lives independently of us and despite us. A world where there is no waste or residue because there are no purposes and functions. A world where there is no end. Text by Vincenzo Di Rosa